 With a Gwlymiad, everyone? With a Gwlymiad. Can I speak in soft tones for those with hard heads this morning? Are we in need of some soothing start to the morning? Good morning, thank you all so much for coming this morning, I'm sure you all enjoyed as I hear the evening's reception into the wee hours, so thank you to those dedicated few that have managed to get up this morning and come to the start of today's OER 24. I fawr, sy'n ddiw i'n gwneud oedden nhw, y pethau Romur o'r cyffredig yn diddilyglio'n gwneud o'r cyffredig, byddwn i ddim ddim yn porog hon i'n dey� yn ei wneud a wneud i chi. O'r unrhyw gyrhaedd ar y dryf, i chi'n gweithio'n gwaith o'r bydd, i ddim yn ddigonu i'r wneud o firth y Cymru a'r gwneud o'r trefydd ffain i chi, a byddwn i chi ddaeth iddi, a bod y diwethaf yma ar y cwmffrin fel yw'r parwch, doedd yna nhw, a'r idea yw'r ysgol yma a'r ddweud beth mae'n dweud yma a'r ddweud yma o'i'r ysgol yma a'r logo rwy'n ddweud. A rwy'n ddyd i'r ddweud yma. Mae'r ddweud yma i'w ddweud yma i chi o'r ysgol. Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ddweud yma, gallwch ei wneud y QR code a'r QR code yna ond ar y channel Slac Cat. Mae'n gweithio ar y link trwy rydyn ni, ond yn y link ac yn fwy o'r dweud yma i'n gweithio i'r gweithio ar y cwymol. Felly rwy'n galluے gael eiquétydd o'r canlau hefyd, felly mae rwy'n gallu gafod ar hyn yn zeithio i'r ffordd. Mae Lleinrwy Gweithio i'r Allanραu i'r Unedig yn ganferio cyflawni, mae gennymn iawn o ymddangos eirydd i'r unig yn unedig iawn i'r ungeisio lŷ o'r iawn. Rwy'n gweithio'r uneg o'r Unedig iawn i'r Unedig iawn i'r Unedig iawn i'r unig, a gael cyflosio maen nhw i ddweud iawn i'r ungeisio lleol iawn. Felly, we have about 3,500 members in total from all across the UK and internationally. We hope that some of you who don't know us might also start to engage with us more broadly today. We have a very broad definition of what learning technology is. Some people often say, you are the association for learning technologists, which is partially true, a lot of our members are of course learning technologists, but we think of learning technology much more broadly, and we want to engage with people and professionals who engage with learning technology for teaching, learning and assessment in its broadest possible sense. So we're certainly not just for learning technologists, we're for everyone who's interested in learning technology and supporting students and staff with the use of learning technologies. You might ask yourselves, why are we here? What have we got to do with open education? Why is this a thing that we support? Why is our logo everywhere? Openness is one of our core values, and what you will see that the Association for Learning Technology has always done is we share as much as we possibly can, completely, openly, completely for free, and it's been a core part of our values for a very, very long time. The Open Education Conference came to us, and I'm looking at Myron Deepwell and Martin Weller, who were the orchestrators of this, came to us when was it, Martin, do you remember? 2015, so the Open Education Conference was run previously, and they were looking for a home, and the Association for Learning Technology between Martin and Myron brought the Open Education Conference to Alts, and it's been its home ever since. And it's a really important part of what we do. As I say, it's one of our core values, and it means a great deal to us as well as it does to you to make sure that this conference is as exciting and interesting and professionally important as it is to all of you. And Tom and Garode have certainly felt that throughout in the organisation of this conference. It is important as well. And you might wonder as well why I mentioned Myron Deepwell, so those of you that don't know, and she thought she probably got away with it. Myron Deepwell was our CEO for over a decade. She stepped down last September and has been working independently ever since, and I'm sure she thought that she would get away with, not having to mention it all, but she forgot who she put in charge instead. So, there we go. You'll see on pretty much all of the materials that we produce, we always use a creative common licence, share a like, use it as you see fit. We really are keen to ensure that everybody can use as much as we produce, reuse it. Anything that you like, our annual survey results are publicly published. All of those things you can use as much as you like. We publish the recordings from our events completely for free and openly as well after the events. So we try as much as we possibly can to model the open practices that we like to support through this conference. If you didn't know as well, we've had an open access journal since 1993, so we do this in collaboration with Open Academia. It's grown and grown and grown over the years and is in a fantastic position now, a really well-regarded journal. So not only is it somewhere that you can go for information and finding the latest research on learning technology, but it's also a possible place for you to consider for dissemination of your own work and your own practices and your own papers. So do keep that in mind as you do your work. There's a fantastic place there to go and share. This is the right audience for this, of course. Our framework for ethical learning technology, and there's been a lot of talk about ethics, particularly in reference to GenAI. One of the things that we often do with members and some of them may actually be here, I think, who worked on this framework, is we share these sorts of frameworks, our knowledge and our understanding very openly as well. So do take a look. There's lots of information that I could tell you. Lots of things that we do that I couldn't even fit into this presentation. So do go and explore our website as well. We also do multiple events as well. So obviously you're at OER this year and we have our September annual conference coming up very shortly, and that's our largest conference on the broader wider theme around learning technologies. And that'll be in Manchester this year from the 3rd to the 5th of September. And Scott, Farrow and Diane Bennett will be our co-chairs for this year and will shortly be releasing the registration and also the call for papers as well. So if you've got something you want to share, then do consider that as well in September. And of course there's no such thing as a free conference. We're also looking for co-chairs for next year. If you've been seeing OER, you like the vibe and you think I'd like to be involved in that next year, then come and talk to myself or Katie and talk to Tom and Garode about what it's been like to be co-chairs, but we are looking for co-chairs for next year. So if that sounds like something you want to get involved in, please do come and talk to us. We also have a number of members in special interest groups. Our special interest groups focus around themes. So we have an open education special interest group as well. But we also have some UK and regional groups which people can engage with that do local and regional events about topics important to our members. We also have our Certified Membership Scheme if you haven't heard about that. That's a way to gain some professional accreditation and recognition for the work that you do with learning technologies and it's just another way to develop and reflect upon the work that you've done throughout your careers. And I'm going to end quickly so that we don't run into the day, but I just want to start by thanking our headlines sponsor, Ontario and to Robert and his team, for supporting this conference. To GoGN, and GoGN have been a long time through Martin and the rest of the team, a long-standing support of this conference and they've been a sponsor again this year and they've been co-chairs in the past. So a huge thank you to them as ever and lots of their delegates are here as well enjoying the conference. Instructure, of course, and if you haven't already, do go through there. I think they had some pandas yesterday. I don't know if there are any left, but if that sounds good, go and grab one of those. And to our event partners, Folter. And Entutor, and of course Entutor last night, released their white paper on open education. So if you didn't manage to grab a copy of that, please do go and grab it from one of the M2U team. There should be some copies of that as well. And of course they sponsored last night's wonderful reception and music, so a big thank you to them. I also really want to make a proper shout out to the conference committee who do so much to contribute to this conference. These are their names. Some of them are here. I know Alice is here somewhere. I've seen Alice there. She is at the back there. So we've got quite a few of them here. Laurie's here as well. Donna is here. And they do a lot to contribute to this conference. They've been running around, chairing sessions and helping out with that sort of thing. So a big and huge thank you to them. And I'm absolutely certain that I've missed lots of people who have contributed here from M2U to this conference, but I wanted to make a special mention, of course, to all of the team from M2U, especially M2U Tell team, who have done a huge amount to make this conference happen, including having to deal with my slides at the last minute this morning. And they've just been fantastic. Katie and I are on a busman's holiday. We've just been able to turn up and enjoy the conference and everything has just been running so smoothly. So a huge thank you to them and to all the team. And of course lastly, I'm going to hand over to our co-chairs who I think you'll all agree have done such a great job this year of just the themes for this conference, the way it's been put together. They've done a huge amount of work to get this conference together. So you put your hands together and welcome Tom and Geroad, our co-chairs. Even the second time, you still didn't mention your name, Kerry. It's Kerry Pini. Kerry everyone. Kerry Pini. I don't have much to say this morning really. I hope you all had a good night. You had a good night. I was told I had a good night. Yeah. We've done our best. I hope you enjoyed it. So look, whatever kind of night you had, we're very grateful to have you here with us here again. And we're going to make it work for a while because next up we have our second keynote. Okay. So this is a joint keynote in fact by Dr Catherine Cronan and Professor Laura Cernivitz. They are as most of you know the co-editors of this. I'm just straining to... Hang on. Help us out there. Okay. Thank you. But this recent collection of essays and papers and speculative fiction and poetry and images all providing different responses to that really important question. How can we build a better future for higher education? I think a lot of people in the audience have contributed to this collection as well. So you'll be familiar with it as well. But Catherine and Laura, of course, would be known independently as critical scholars. Catherine told me to get the word critical in there. Critical scholars and advocates for open education. But Catherine will be very well known to those of us in the Irish higher education sector for her work on the National Forum and the leadership she provided there in terms of open education. And I must say personally, and I know it will be the same for you, you've always been just so generous with your time and your ideas and your knowledge and that's really appreciated. And of course, Laura, you've played such a key strategic and scholarly role in open education in your own country and internationally, so it's just such a great pleasure to have you here with us. Absolutely. No, no, it's a particular pleasure to welcome you here because we're getting a different voice and genuinely, for people if you haven't read this, you talk about, are you saying about being open, being open to different formats we're so used to our standard scholarly piece. But this really choice to capture the breadth of human endeavour around and question what we're talking about for higher education for good, whatever that good looks like. Indeed. OK. Over to you guys. Thank you so much. OK. Good morning everyone. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you guys. Thank you to Alt and Geroad and Tom for inviting us to do this novel joint keynote this morning. And thank you all for being here early on day two. Our keynote is called, The Future Isn't What It Used to Be, Open Education at a Crossroads, maybe some resonance with Rajiv's message yesterday, we feel. And as I said, this is a joint keynote. It was developed jointly, very jointly, and we're going to deliver it jointly. So we're not doing someone doing part one, someone doing part two. We're just going to do this together here. But before we get started, we just want to acknowledge this community, the OER conference community, is a very special community. I know this has been said many times. Those of you who have come to open education conferences in the years past will know that. Those of you who are new, I hope you'll join this community on an ongoing basis. I first came to this conference in 2015 in Cardiff, co-chaired by Martin. And I never stopped coming after that. So this isn't my 10th in a row. The conference is a gathering of open educators from so many different contexts. And it's not just about educators who are practicing open, but who open possibilities for others. And in thinking about it last night, I was just thinking it's a very life-giving conference in a lot of ways. It's life-giving for us. We've talked about, but also improving lives of all of the people who you hear help students, educators, people outside higher education to realize their full potential and improve their lives. So we're really, really happy to be here. And thank you. Our slides are available at the link here. They are openly licensed, except we're otherwise indicated. Our keynote is also available as a keynote essay, because Laura and I did a lot of this development over a distance. We had a written version of the keynote, which we kind of polished up when we were together over the last week or so, and we've made that available to you. And all the references are there, too. All of the references, yes. Every reference here. So if you don't catch things or if you want to dive into anything, it's there. So we'd like to start by introducing ourselves, because some of you know us, but some of you might be saying, okay, there's this person from South Africa and someone else from Galway who's really from New York, and what do they have to say about open? So we're going to start by winding the clock back just a little, okay? All the way back to the 1960s. Guess who's who. Both Laura and I were children in the 1960s, and I was born in the U.S. I was born in the Bronx in New York City. My parents were also born in New York City, but my grandparents were born here in Ireland, and my maternal grandmother, I was actually born in Caergynabar, which is just 10 miles from where we're standing. And in the New York City in the 1960s, it was a time of political and social unrest in very many ways. So there were political protests against poverty, against the Vietnam War, against gender and racial discrimination. There was the movement for civil rights, the Stonewall uprising and more. So that's a little picture of New York in the 1960s. And my Polish father, hence the surname, and my French mother moved to South Africa after the Second World War in the 1950s in search of a better life. They were migrants like generations continue to be. Of course, what they didn't realise was that South Africa was in the throes of apartheid. And the 1960s was also the decade of the end of the British Empire and African country after African country were gaining independence, which had a huge influence on my life. But the world at that time was only 3 billion people. And carbon dioxide at that time was 317 parts per million, which is apparently regarded as okay. Okay, we'll go forward to the 80s and 90s. We're not going to do every decade. In the 80s and 90s, I lived in Ireland, Scotland and the US, and I was raising a young family, had two children. I worked in the IT industry briefly after qualifying as an engineer. And then I moved into higher education, worked at the UK Open University, Stirling University, the University of Galway, as well as community education in those countries. A lot of work in women in technology, women in disadvantaged areas, and gender in technology. And in terms of activism outside work, I was active in anti-war campaigns, again in a few of those countries, as well as several feminist campaigns against gender-based violence and for abortion rights since the 1980s. And I was living in post-independent Zimbabwe in the 1980s where my first child was born and I arrived back in South Africa just in time for the elections for a new dispensation, and my second child was born. I worked in teaching, teacher education, educational publishing, curriculum transformation in both countries. And of course I was involved with anti-aparte activities during the 1980s and feminism from an overlapping context-based perspective. The population just as a snapshot was 5.3 billion in 1990 and CO2 354 parts per million today. That's us in Cork at the weekend in Clonicalty. We worked together for the past almost three years on the book, like Erode just mentioned, Higher Education for Good, and on this keynote we've collaborated on other work as well. Our lives are very different to one another, obviously, and they're very different to yours. So what we're saying this morning is really from where we come from and we hope that you'll accept it as that. We think that the conversations we need to have all of us need all of what we bring here. Work for change in so many areas. Think of climate, peace, equal rights. It requires diverse coalitions, intergenerational, multi-generational, and that's kind of our message today, is that we hope that that perspective, that spirit, can be part of what we do in open education. Next one. Sorry, I should mention that 8.1 billion, 8.1 billion in terms of the population, and 422 parts per million. Pretty tripled in our lifetime. So we are in a crisis and we're going to talk about that, about the climate. So today's keynote, three parts. The big picture. Open education at a crossroads and building better futures. And it's a good thing that the essay is going to be made available because we cannot cover everything that we would like to have covered. Okay. Just a photo, an openly licensed photo from Flickr to celebrating the beauty of County Cork. This is the West Cork coast. I didn't take this photo. We'd like to start by doing a very brief icebreaker. But we first want to mention Kate Bowles. We're doing a version of an icebreaker that Kate Bowles used at OER19 in Galway. It's a silent icebreaker, so any of the extroverts who are looking forward to getting out of their chairs, we're really sorry. And we had, as soon as OER24 was announced, we had some conversations with Kate about what we could do and what we might be at this conference. So we wanted to bring her with us today. So we're doing it this way. And as I said, it's a one-minute icebreaker and it's silent just with yourself. And I'm going to ask you to just think quietly and deeply about three people. So first, one person who made it easier for you to be here at the conference, maybe someone who's protecting your time and your attention, looking after your house or your children or your dog or your work. So think of that person. Secondly, I'd like to ask you to think of one person who you regret is not here at the conference, but work or other responsibilities made it impossible for them to be here. So I invite you to bring that person quietly into the room. And finally, I ask you to think deeply about someone who helped you on the longer journey to bring you here. So who fostered your creativity, your courage, and who supported you in your education and your career, maybe the path to bring you where you are today. So, please think of that person. Thank you. That's it. It's just a reminder really that we're so much more than our corporeal reality. We talked about diversity a few minutes ago, but there are so many others that support us in so many ways, visible and invisible. So thank you. And now we're going to get started with the body of the presentation. First is what we're calling the big picture, section one. We don't need to say this, but we're going to say it. These are really not just obligatory slides, but we feel this is the only place that we can start. That society is globally suffering from a concatenation of crises, which is called a polycrisis, in the sense that each crisis impacts and exacerbates the others. The crises, of course, include inequality, including but not limited to COVID, the climate crisis, as we said, worsening each year, human rights crises, linked to polarization and othering, cost of living crises, conflict, rising autocracy, forced migration, and so much more. So we understand that these global crises are experienced locally. We have a lot of data in the essay that we shared with you, but just as an example, we wanted to make a point that the crises of inequality are both intersectional and horizontal. So, whilst disparities exist between south and global north, which we will talk about a bit this morning, no continent is immune from inequality, and this particular analysis looks at inequality within countries. So it's from the World Inequality Report 2022, and it's the national average income levels over, sorry, the ratio of earnings of the top 10% to the bottom 10%. So the darker colours are the more severe inequality. So it's not just global south and global north. There's severe inequalities within countries, and we think it's important to note that if this troubles the neat, global north, global south divide. And finally, before I hand back over to Laura, the climate crisis, again, just pervades everything. So 2023 exceeded 1.5 degrees C warming globally on average for the first time, and the climate crisis, of course, interlinks with every other crisis. It's been mentioned here at the conference with AI, with higher education. This image is from a report by the Post Carbon Institute. Welcome to the great unraveling, which is a counterpose to the great acceleration of the last century. And the report really talks a lot about what we can do in response. So we're going to bring that to what we can do in higher education, what we can do in open education. And I will hand over to you, Laura. Oh. OK, so the other crisis that we thought was really important to include was the crisis of conflict and polarisation. This report is the Democracy Index, and it has five categories, which it measures on a scale of 1 to 10. And over the last few years, it has been dropping every year. And in 2023, only 8% of the world's population lived in what is categorised as a full democracy. So the last report is called The Age of Conflict, and it's about authoritarianism. It's about polarisation. As Catherine said, this infiltrates our work. And related to that is the fact that the human rights, the director of the Human Rights Watch, says that human rights are under threat. The entire system is under threat. And it reminds us to go back to the 1948 declaration of human rights, which is about the foundation of freedom, justice and peace that has been signed by all the countries in the UN. And it's the basis of all treaties and conventions since then. And so this, in a way, goes beyond democracy and it goes beyond inequality to the fundamentals of society. But, of course, we also have to acknowledge that we now live in a digital, datified world. It is the water we are immersed in. It is the water we swim in. And also that the optimism of that early open web, where the web was going to foster creativity and collaboration and empower humanity, it's been dashed. And a thousand flowers have not bloomed. We now have big tech as the connective tissue of society, not just tech, but big tech, as Maria Ressa, the recent Nobel laureate of peace, described it. She said big tech is the cellular level of society. And we also have governments who have the ability to switch off the internet. So in 2022 there were 187 shutdowns in 35 countries. So the days of openness and the open web that we, some of us of a certain age, became so hopeful about have ended. But of course all of this is in relation to digital divides and those digital divides morph. It's not like they get solved. The goalposts keep shifting and they keep taking new shapes. So although it's true that cell phones are widespread throughout the whole world, they differ by type of cell phone, occasion of cell phone, once again within countries as well as across the world. Rural and urban being one of the main things, but also huge income divides. And you may wonder why is this picture here. This is a picture of people during Covid lining up in a semi-urban area collecting social grants. And I think for those of us who are critical, as Gerard said, it's easy to be critical of data, but data is really important for development. And data is really important for IDs, for grants, for overcoming inequality actually. And so what we like to emphasise is that the issue isn't data, it's the terms and conditions of data. And if you look at those people, they will be connected through data, surveyed, and ironically very often it is the poorest of society who are the most vulnerable to big tech, because big tech will come in and offer free Wi-Fi. And of course what they are getting in return is people's data through their cell phones, through the Wi-Fi, etc. So very often it's the poor who are most likely to be exploited. And of course we have to mention AI. We've chosen this image because we just want to mention at this point that AI reflects the society we live in. It is unequal, it skews hegemonic to quote Emily Bender. It's in the hands of the private sector, there's extraordinary data about the extent to which it has become in the hands of the private sector. But we are going to talk more about this in terms of what that means for open education later. Rajiv spoke about this yesterday. It's well documented, the underfunding and in fact defunding of higher education globally. We write about this in our book which I'll mention in a minute. The culture of the market is embedded in the higher education sector, not just in the practices, the very visible management practices, but in fact in the discourse and the very culture. It's become embedded very deeply. So what does underfunding look like? We know what it looks like. It looks like staffing cuts, cutting programs, rising costs, widespread resource restrictions, and so on. These things that we observe were boosted and accelerated during the pandemic but they're not just because of the pandemic as we know. The costs for HE are enormous in terms of the work that we do, loss of autonomy, opaque data flows, potential privacy violations, selling data to third party providers as Laura said, and threats to academic freedom in various ways. So the narrative of this conference and part of our role as open educators is to ensure very much we think that digital transformation isn't reduced just to outsourcing digital infrastructure and data tracing or activity tracing via data. Wrapping up this section on the big picture with a focus on higher education, even prior to COVID we saw many of these things that we spoke about and there was a sense of discouragement and even despair on the part of many of us in higher education. We felt this as well. So we were determined to find a way through the morass, as we said. We just put a call out two years ago, just over two years ago, inviting people to write about their work, their vision and provide glimmers of hope for the future of higher education, given all the things that we've just explored. And we published Higher Education for Good as editors in October 2023 and I think I'm going to include everyone here. Several authors are in the room so I want to call out Paula, Kate and Claire, Anne-Marie, Scott, Lorna, Campbell, Francis Bell, Sharon Flynn, Eamon Costello. So if you want to talk about the book, we are really clear that we don't want to take all the oxygen in the room about this book. This book only exists because of the amazing work done by so many. Sheila McNeill also did some artwork for the book and George Sogaras did the amazing cover art for the book and we thank them and all of the artists. So everyone who contributed really offered imaginative proposals about the future of higher education and we synthesized the findings and we tried to pull the threads across all of those pieces of work and we wrote in our introduction about a manifesto for higher education for good which we'll return to at the end of this presentation. So we have a few questions just that drove us in this work on the keynote to try and respond to this wonderful invitation and it was these. How can the open education movement and open education values flourish in an increasingly closed, authoritarian, anti-democratic, othering world? As it says, what's the role of our movement in general and open education in particular in responding to these crises and how can we call to action here, how can we individually and together meet this moment? So our second section is open education at a crossroads. So we're looking at the past, present and future of higher, of open education and we found this rich metaphor we think about open education at a crossroads and anyone who's from Ireland in the room what do you think of when I say crossroads? Had to be done dancing at the crossroads. This is a photo from Naachman Lee, I think it's pronounced County Cork. I had to pick this particular photograph of dancing at the crossroads because it's here in Cork in 1912. For those of you who aren't from Ireland, the phrase dancing at the crossroads refers to an actual cultural event that used to happen of where people would gather to play music and dance in the open spaces of crossroads. Crossroads dances were very popular up to the mid 20th century in rural Ireland then they were banned by law but that's another story. But it's not just in Ireland that crossroads are a rich signifier. They're in other cultures as well. We went down many rabbit holes when we were preparing this talk and it was fascinating to discover that there are gods and goddesses of crossroads in many cultures and one of them is the misunderstood god Esu who is in Benin, in Togo, in Nigeria and then crossed over to Latin America probably through various things. Sometimes it's different names and Wally Soiengke, who is another Nobel laureate, talks about him being a dialectician, someone who looks beneath the surface, someone who doesn't trust appearances. We love that. Then Hecate is a goddess of the crossroads in ancient Greece who often holds keys or a torch and sometimes is between worlds. What we loved about this is that this is limonality, transition. It really speaks to what we believe is this moment in open education and we realise it's not only us that others are using this metaphor. In democracy, data, copyright, there's some great work around the crossroads as a moment. We're going to take a moment to ask you what do you think of when you hear open education? Okay, great. Hope, access, care, potential, collaboration, scrappy. That's a great one. I'm coming to that. Justice, stories, potentiality, common good. Non-corporate, interesting. Long breath. Long walk. Long walk to freedom. Joy. Thank you. I'm hoping we're going to be able to come back to this but we're also mindful of time. Thank you. Thank you. The person who... Can we go back to our slides? The person who said scrappy spoke to the next slide. There was an analysis done of open education in the broader open ecosystem because we know there's open access, there's open data, et cetera. This analysis showed the extent to which open education is a silo. And we are concerned about that. We think that's given the broader stakes of society in general, we think there is a real opportunity for the open ecosystem to be working more closely together, forming conscious alliances, reducing duplication, sharing strategies and strengthening movements towards social justice. So it's an interesting report to look at. So we're going to now talk about our reading of what's changed in the last seven years. Okay. So really quickly, we looked at the recent past of how open education has evolved and then we look at the present and we'll move to the future. So in our analysis we chose OAR 17 as a starting point for a review of what the discussions have been in open education in this community. It's not a formal review. It's our informal one. We think research in this area would be really interesting. OAR 17 took place in London. The theme was the politics of open. The chairs were Josie Fraser and Alex Tarkovsky. We were on a final panel with Meryn O'Keef. I'm not sure where Meryn is. And then two years later we co-chaired OAR 19 in Galway. And the theme of that conference was to bring open critical and global perspectives. So there's been an evolution of ideas over the OAR conference. So we looked at the OAR conference primarily as well as other open education conferences and did some online searches of what was being talked about in open and what are those conversations like today. And we found this really interesting and we're just going to share some top-line items with you now. So firstly, were we aware of then so since at least 2017 the OAR conference has had a strong theme of equity, social justice and critical approaches. So it's really more embedded, isn't it? And yes, and indeed it has become more embedded. So it's encouraging to see how these themes have, as Laura said, become more embedded and further promoted and not just open education but higher education. It's not enough but it's great that there's increasing recognition. Present in 2017 and again is the focus on higher education and national and international politics. So national politics, conflict, refugee crises and so on. Also present in 2017 and increasing since then has been engagement with feminism particularly intersectional feminism recognized as someone mentioned yesterday as a key component of open pedagogy, feminist pedagogy and for example OAR 19 was the starting point of the FEMED Tech Quilt. Many contributors are in this room and Francis Bell was responsible for pulling all that together. So these are things that we're encouraged about. How about things that there was some awareness then but there's just some awareness now it hasn't really developed that much. There was talk about that we need more work on the commons. We're still saying that, we need more work and more attention on the commons and its potential. So our research shows little change in writing in this area, Paul Stacey Jim Luke, Alex Tarkovsky Open Education Policy I saw Javier, I'm going to go. We still need much more robust work in this area and it's been a threat of this conference. Javier attain us, Leo Havenman Lorna Campbell and here in Ireland work by Tony Murphy and myself at the National Forum and others and Ashlyn Coyne. So those are some pillars of work that's going on in Open Education Policy and we need much more. And finally there were early observations at that time that we need copyright reform that has just accelerated we need more work in that area. Some awareness then and our key issues now there was mention of course about the infiltration of big tech but now it is a huge issue and AI in education need I say anymore. Completely unforeseen. It's interesting looking at this because when we talk in five or seven years from now what will we say was completely unforeseen in 2024 we don't know. But of course COVID-19 the splintering of social media the bad actors and the dissolution of a platform that we all in Open Education used quite a lot to communicate with one another and the enclosure of open content. So again just some of our observations when we look back and see how the conversations have evolved. I'll hand over to you Laura. Just to emphasise we really think some more research needs to be done. These are our preliminary observations. So what about the exogenous factors? What are the factors that are from outside the community that we're having to contend with? And really the main most significant factor is AI. And we are in that group who believes this is a paradigmatic shift and that there's an irony around AI and open licensing because we are giving permission for use we are giving permission for potential harms. And we are already seeing for example with facial recognition software being trained with openly licensed images and those numerous court cases around illegal use do not apply to us and we believe this needs a lot of thought. We also need to think about the work that we do we're doing some really interesting work in AI but have we been reading the terms and conditions ourselves? There's a fantastic presentation by Tory Trust who points out that the prompts that we create are owned by the big tech companies so we are in effect training the AI tutors who will replace us and we're doing that legally. These are harms and these are harms we need to be mindful of. We're also concerned about lack of transparency the fact that these large language models are owned by big tech makes them very opaque and for those of us who are worrying about new governance models we are struggling to understand the rules and the terms in order to be able to think differently about open in the future. Even before AI there was discussion about future proofing of licences we know the creative commons has been looking at the principles of licences and whether they fit for purpose but the copyright turmoil that is happening right now around whether AI is copyrightable whether fair use applies it does in the US, it doesn't in Australia what about here this pertains directly to our work but legal is only one consideration there's a difference between what's legal and allowable and what we might consider ethical what we might feel comfortable with and these are really complex issues that need far more attention than we can do other than to signal them. But they're also endogenous factors these are factors within our own community so one of them is the fact that leadership is in flux and of course it's normal for transitions to happen in organisations but it is something we note that a number of important open education communities right now have gone through and are going through leadership transitions we can think of four nationally in South Africa et cetera and when it happens all at once it's a worry and the people who are holding those ships together are doing a fantastic job let me not for one minute suggest otherwise but they don't always have the mandate to take on these big issues these big strategic issues and that's a worry when big tech and other forces are moving so fast and then the other thing to mention is funding always funding I attended a US conversation about how open ed in the US can work together their identified funding is the number one concern and then there's the question of sustainability models it's a nightmare it's hard it's intractable but we have no choice it is something we have to do because other forces are moving really fast so we could talk for a long time about rethinking the meaning of open we've seen old discourses in new bottles we've seen open washing we've seen the word open used for meanings that are certainly not shared by us and with extract of free labour underpinning these new models of the sharing economy it really asks us to rethink what we mean by open practices and articulate that very clearly so we think that the meaning of open itself needs attention we're now going to talk about not having depressed you too much how we can build better futures I hope you're still with us one of the best things that happens at conferences like this is the connections that we make with each other so I'm sure everyone here has had the experience of going to a conference and having not just sparks of ideas but maybe meeting someone that you might then collaborate with in your teaching or write a paper with or do a big project with or whatever so we love seeing that happen at this conference here today many many people experiences and this conference has been responsible for many such collaborations like this one we meet together and we share our work openly not just openly but with hope and humility we have the opportunity to inspire one another to go further removing ourselves from sometimes the constraints and discouraging constraints in our own institutional environments so at this moment we really want to say just that we know that our collective challenges are great as we've explored here but we just now want to share our ideas for moving forward and it's there in the form of questions you know we don't have the answers but we have collected some questions we want to share them with you we did think at one point that we would stand up here with the solutions but we gave up on that yeah we did not enough time so here's where we're going to just return to higher education for good and higher education for good as I said we pulled all of the threads together from everything everyone had contributed and we came up with something that we called towards a manifesto for higher education not pretending that there could be one manifesto for everyone but pointing towards a manifesto so we've just adapted it here and we're now going to use that manifesto into looking at open education rather than higher education and again this is not just our work this reflects the work of all of the people that contributed to higher education for good and there are five tenets to the manifesto name and analyse the troubles of higher education challenge, assumptions and register and make claims for just humane and globally sustainable open education courageously imagine and share fresh possibilities and make positive changes so we'll go through these really briefly and then we'll ask for your ideas and then we'll finish so we've kind of done this one the previous part of our talk was really our attempt at this naming the challenges bringing them into the room knowing that that's what we have to address no matter what our work is so we're not going to say much more of that here they are definitely the challenges that we face in open education at this time of fluidity and unease it's a broad overview, it's a partial picture we're not pretending that that is the full picture but we just want to say that there's no escaping the needs to name these things in the work that we do and not make the assumption that everybody knows that these are the crises that we need to address it's essential in moving forward there's valuable work happening in many parts of the open ecosystem not all of it translates or appears in the open education sphere so we need to do a little bit more communication with other parts of the open ecosystem we are always mindful of course of overworking and underfunding so we just really ask how it might be possible in this time to have around naming and analysing could we develop a process to map the issues in open education that could be collectively created and collectively shared and drawn from how can we deeply understand the ways that these wider global crises impact open education and the work of open education can we develop and in some senses continue cross sectoral research underpinned always by equity concerns and as a broader open education community can we make the necessary projects happen and urgently it's a good thing this isn't a gusto because we're going to go into question time with your permission is that okay okay so in terms of challenging and resisting we love this quote arundati roi there's really no such thing as the voiceless there are only the deliberately silenced and the preferably unheard there are so many forms of resistance and refusal we're very mindful that people do that within the context in which they work we can resist silicon valley narratives we can try and use open infrastructure we can also think about our own power relations within this community open education is based on generosity but generosity implies power relations and it's hard to be on the receiving end of having to be grateful so I think that those kinds of hegemony that we might ourselves be enacting also need attention and here we ask how can we challenge these dominant and harmful discourses how can we resist extractive practices some people in our book have really spoken about that how can we counter extractive free labour this is a scary one it's hard how can we build the requisite digital literacies work that's being done by so many people here and how can we build inclusive governance arrangements you say governance and people freeze it's really important the third tenant is making claims for just humane and globally sustainable open education we borrowed this from social justice work which clearly makes the case that it's not enough just to resist and protest and adapt but that if we are leading we need to make clear claims to what open education can be that can help rally energy around what possible paths to better futures so we have to be clear about what those claims are and in higher education for good the themes that came out were just humane and globally sustainable that was kind of the umbrella term for the claims that were made in the book to the good in all its interpretations so we wonder how open education can operate in and contribute to ethical, non discriminatory non exploitative technology systems where human rights are preserved and protected we like Rajiv did yesterday we argue that the open education community is much more than access we must be true to the pillars of not just social justice but algorithmic justice and all forms of design justice epistemic justice and more it's inspiring to see how many sessions in this conference are dealing with just these issues so this is work that we certainly are going to share and make sure that other people know about we were doing some of that yesterday using our limited and splintered social media but it is truly inspiring to see the work that goes on here and it will embolden others and it already has emboldened others through the sharing that's happening these critical approaches we would just ask you to keep the perspective that you are making positive claims that again can be taken forward by others in other contexts to see how we can work countering dominant narratives and inspiring kind of imaginative approaches for the future so a few questions these are really specific but in terms of making claims what is our responsibility when we make a claim for using open digital infrastructure it's very difficult there are challenges but how can we do that how can open educators work to change the dominant values and models of AI what claims could we make open do we have particular responsibility and what is that to ensure data justice and again what is the role of open educators in raising the ecological resistance ecological issues of open related work particularly now in the realm of AI and we know that it takes courage to imagine differently and it takes courage in the context of the work and we want to find ways of speculating using different genres finding different ways of imagining and opening that up in this really narrow academic space in which we work it's hard and if you're at the mercy of metrics and all of those difficult parameters but we think it's really important it's the only way that we can find alternatives and we really need alternatives so we ask how can we use alternative border crossing approaches how can we support a new generation and we're looking across this room there are people we need to be handing the baton over to we have a role to play but in order for this work to go forward there are wonderful young people working in climate justice and in other areas that we'd like to see that all come together and how can we find ways of creating those spaces it's really hard and it takes courage and finally yes making positive changes in whatever area and whatever scope is possible for us we believe like many people here that change is possible and now is the time challenges are to be expected opposition is to be expected but all effective social movements for change that you can think of women's rights, workers rights civil rights, LGBTQ plus rights if you look back at those movements they encounter resistance people take different paths some people work for policy change some work for legal change some carry the signs in the streets some knock on doors that's how change happens so accepting difference amongst us as well about the ways that we might work is also important and the fact that there may be conflict that we need to work through in doing that all approaches are needed and all are needed right now we can, in fact we have a link in our essay to about a dozen or more initiatives of open education advocacy groups that you can join today tomorrow whatever if you want to be part of some of that work the questions here how do we create the space and the time it's so difficult for this collective work and for building power to ensure that change happens what initiatives can we join and contribute to again I said we shared a few examples but there will be many more as Laura mentioned how can openness be re-articulated in this moment the context has changed so we need to look at that context and how can governance and structural forms be reconsidered so we're going to ask you a question and then we'll wrap up Yes and this is instead of the Q&A this is this is an alternative that will allow everyone in this room to make suggestions because as there's a limited view can you think about what we right now in this community with limited resources could do leap to communicate as much as possible to people outside this community yes right to a politician in your university keep hopeful, keep talking help to your college folks advocate influence strategy and policy I'm sorry I can't read the collaborate with the open system more discussion demystify, dance at the crossroads be kind, come together support, start small, keep the faith talk to others beyond our community online sprints I like that keep banging the OE drum discuss the challenges share wow wow imagine if we did this for a little bit longer we'd have a plan I think we need a post script to the essay actually we can do that let's keep going sorry we just have a wrap up slide okay sorry we have a wrap up slide no no I was asking for permission I hate to cut the short please keep contributing we'll okay I'll go back to the slide chair just for a second include others these are beautiful thank you so much okay we return to the crossroads at the end these are some stones that Laura and I gathered over the last few days that we were working together in different parts of this beautiful county we who imagine open education that is just an emancipatory are many and we're diverse we know that and we face myriad complex challenges so it's understandable to feel despair and certainly overwhelm where we are but as we said other movements for social change have also that we're dealing with perhaps even greater obstacles remind us that a single action is not what solves the issues it's not what overcomes but it's collectively so working in partnerships in coalitions collaborating in various ways and we think you know and kind of wrapping up we think that this community the open education community is so well placed to address the challenges that we have this community has a long standing understanding and engagement with the imperative and the challenges of social justice approaches implementing social justice approaches this is work that we have done in the realm of openness for many years as we've shared this community also has a record of research and action on so many of the issues that require action right now so again open infrastructures, critical approaches digital and data literacies now that we're talking about AI literacies open education policy working across global networks what we know is required the open education community has been doing this so we are in a powerful and ideal place to meet the moment we think if we work together some networks are already forming so we don't have to necessarily create brand new networks but these need to grow and they need to be connected so mindful of time we could say more but we'll leave it there we just want to conclude with a call to action recently expressed by Mary Robinson for those of you who may not know Mary Robinson's former president of Ireland former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights currently chair of the Elders and a long standing advocate for gender equality peace building, climate justice and human rights and in Mary Robinson's words our best future can still lie ahead of us it's up to us to get there thank you thank you so much despite your best efforts I think there might actually be time for one question so does anyone have a question it would be ironic if nobody did a comment can somebody get a microphone down to Mary and thanks Jeremiah I want to say thank you for this talk and how inspiring it is you talk a lot about personal action and that the time is now and I wonder if you could just share maybe a little bit about your where you see kind of the next step you've mentioned some of the groups that we can join but if someone is sitting here thinking I want to do something but I just don't know how to start what would you say is a good stepping stone so I think there are multiple strategies we provided a list of organisations that people can join that are already doing this kind of thing we don't think we need a new organisation we think we need to work within the existing structures we need to grow them we would argue I think that there isn't enough integration between the open education groupings and of course there are differences and it would be imperfect but the challenges we face are much bigger than our differences so I really believe that we need to start working together across contexts across organisations in order to grow them strength because we really have a sense of fragility in this moment I'll echo that as well and we found in our work together in the book and even putting this keynote together crossing borders is a way to gain strength and power I think we found trust and courage in working with each other we come from very different contexts and many of us have had opportunities to work across contexts so much we don't know when we just operate within our own context within Irish higher education or within one institution so making connections at events like this and learning from other contexts and elevating, realising that some of our issues are the same some are different and again we see that echoed in other movements working across generations across countries, across HE contexts with partners outside HE so those kind of diverse partnerships we think are really key risk, trust let's risk, trust okay folks let's risk, trust and let's get some tea and coffee so thank you very much fantastic keynote speak thanks so much thank you